Day 30

Kununurra is a new town, one that grew in the mid-'60s, rising with the first
dammed waters of what would become the Ord River scheme. It now supplies 75 per
cent of the nation's melon crop, which is more than you can say for, um,
Seaford. Kununurra, from the ancient Aboriginal word for "major melon supply
centre", is home to the aptly titled Lake Kununurra. It's a small, relatively
unattractive but competently utilitarian oasis surrounded by precision-tilled
fields of well-irrigated agricultural exotica, of sandalwood, bananas, sugar
cane, cucumbers and more than a few melons. It also does a brisk trade in
diamonds with two outlets in a small retail strip, that otherwise specialises in
cask muscatel, barramundi lures and diesel, flogging gems from the nearby Argyle
mine. This seems to be of only passing interest to the locals, most of whose
minds are set squarely on melons, but it does offer the tourist the frisson of
proximity to the open cut that supplies about a quarter of the world's most
precious rocks.

Providing dam fine homes for crocs

Other key regional statistics include the fact that the Ord dam, Lake Argyle,
is a mass of water 19 times larger than Sydney Harbour but one that, at 10
billion cubic metres, has reached only 27 per cent of its potential size. This
could aid in the creation of more melons than is entirely reasonable, but any
increase in capacity would only be good news for the population of fresh water
crocodiles. Damming the Ord not only produced a lake, it also produced islands,
and the crocs - in what is a quite a feat of reason for an animal with a brain
the size of a big toe - have deduced that laying eggs offshore improves the
survival chances of their eggs. The population has grown from 5000 endangered
reptiles pre-dam to a robust 20,000.

Time to enjoy an out-of-world experience

But more impressive even than the crocodiles, exquisite gems and great mounds
of cantaloupe are the Bungle Bungles, a masif of eerie but impressive rock
outcrops and gorges that takes its name from the Aboriginal phrase for "rocks
shaped a bit like melons". It's another of those dramatic freaks of nature that
reveals itself most completely from the air, and a bustling shuttle of scenic
flights from Kununurra spend several awestruck and bumpy low circuits gaping at
weird beehives of sandstone laid down in swirling stripes of dun and darker
brown. Canyons punctuate the centre of the range, fissures - cracked by
lightning strikes - reach hundreds of metres into the heart of the plateau. It
is a landscape not entirely of this world, with shapes so grandly surreal it's
hard to imagine what earthly force can have wrought them. The answer is time and
the prevailing south-easterlies. Another taste of the otherworldly lies about 45
minutes' flying time south. This is the Wolf Creek meteor crater, a perfectly
circular levee about the size of the MCG, enclosing an inner bullseye of lush
green. It's not caused by space phosphate still potent millennia after impact;
its just where the water gathers.